Monthly Archives: June 2006

If I once again believed myself a poet, I could tell you the quotidien details of a trip across half the country from Boston to Chicago with mystery and subtlety. But prose will do for the turnpikes and throughways that thread the northern states.

The landforms don’t always change where the states do — the valleys did open up on the MA-NY border — but we noted the transition from broad, heavily wooded valleys to the flat, heavily wooded farmland near the Finger Lakes to the flat, treeless fields west of Ashtabula. (I love farms and fields and tractors, but I now also love the way the Commonwealth looks when you can’t see anything but the trees.) We drew a line on the map near Cleveland where the Midwest started. Nearby a glacial esker with a stand of trees stood out conspicuously amid the straight rows of corn and beans and some new crop I couldn’t recognize.

The East ended much earlier. Somewhere east of Erie, Pennsylvania, three lone crosses stood on a hill. Jesus was on competing radio stations near Rochester. (One told us how to pray the rosary; another told us how to spot Satan’s seductive persuassions.) A classic rock station in Buffalo said anyone could listen to them on the Internet without needing to move there, which is good (“sí, señor”). Alan Jackson was on the radio telling us he didn’t like foreign car drivers and manly women and cell phone users. And we thought everyone at Arby’s could use a visit from Stacy and Clinton from What Not to Wear.

We saw a woman in a salwar kameez at a travel plaza in Indiana.

We drove by the future home of the RV/Motor Home Hall of Fame in the midst of a region of light manufacturing mostly centered around plastics and aluminum and things that you tow behind your truck. We saw signs for the Yellow Brick Road Gift Shop and Museum nearby. A couple miles later, a sign for an August “Leprechaun Hunt.” In Pennsylvnia the roadside signs started, but not until Indiana did we see patriotic public service announcements: “What makes us great? Unity.” and “No setback will set us back. Determination.” The latter used a picture of ground zero but seemed far less genuine than Bruce singing about September 11 when we randomly selected The Rising from our CD collection.

We saw soldiers at lunch in central New York and airmen at breakfast in Pennsylvania and marines in desert fatigues eating Nathan’s hot dogs and small Pizzeria Unos pizzas and chips for lunch in Ohio. I thought we saw a lot of soldiers on vacation last year in India.

Now that I’m doing my photo project, I see high tension lines everywhere. The variety and their placement and the lack of houses nearby surprise me. They were probably there last time, but I just looked through them without noticing, as the people who live under them in the Bay State must do. The cell towers seem new, too.

We passed by Jacobs Field and adult “superstores” without stopping. We saw horses, cows, and deer. We passed redwing blackbirds pronouncing their territory and a heron gliding slowly to rest at the margin of a field. We passed trees and water towers and a grain elevator and outlet malls and restaurants. We passed hotels — all new except that one — with free wireless Internet. We passed houses with trees and many more without. We passed state troopers and road crews as we shifted left and stayed in our lane and kept right.

Yesterday it was overcast and rained. But when the sun came out, the yellow Ferrari and all the rest of us zoomed down the road again. No rain today, but slow going through Chicago to our hotel near O’Hare. The Campus Crusade for Christ is here, and we are trying so hard to be good but our flesh is weak and our tongues are sharp and, Jesus, it’s going to be hard to be good.